Understanding Marxism

I'm in the process of writing something up that challenges his understanding of Marx in relation to his WSDE/worker coop ideas (to say nothing about his endorsement of Sanders and fondness of vanguard parties etc.) There was an anarchist response to his Democracy at Work book on Anarchist Writers, all I've really come across as far as critiques on him.

The so-called anarchists and communists I see recommending him is not really an encouraging sign.

Mike Harman

The co-ops stuff seems to be getting traction due to co-operation Jackson. https://cooperationjackson.org/

There's a huge difference (for me at least) between people doing co-ops as a response to specific circumstances, and pushing co-ops/mutualism as an ideology.

I've seen something about him pushing the idea that immigration is responsible for low wages too, but did not look into it yet.

I haven't seen that. Afaik he's said immigration is used as a scapegoat instead of targetting capitalism as the real source of people's problems. Of course what he identifies as the problem always goes back to capitalist workplaces being undemocratic, and the need to democratize them and turn them into "WSDEs". He even uses the words "Communist Organization" in one interview to refer to them, and says that this is what Marx's aim was (his 'understanding' of Marx was OK for the most part up until then, but this just completely ignores all of Marx's analysis of the commodity in the first couple chapters of Capital; he seems to have no problem with his so-called "Communist" organizations/businesses advancing capital and producing commodities for exchange in the market etc.; and how he derives this from his reading Marx is just amazing):

So, the conclusion for Marx is revolution. You need to get rid of capitalism in order to replace the capitalist-labor relationship, wage labor in the way I’ve described it, with an altogether different system that is more egalitarian, more democratic, and more just, because the workers in each enterprise would become their own board of directors. That’s actually understood by people even if they’ve never heard of Karl Marx. You can see it in the fact that all over the world today, and true for the last 300 years, there are businesses that have organized themselves not as a capitalist corporation, but as what Marx would’ve called a communist organization. That is, it is a community of workers who set up a business and own and operate it themselves.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/23/a-summary-of-marxist-economics-with-richard-wolff/

Mike Harman

I've seen something about him pushing the idea that immigration is responsible for low wages too, but did not look into it yet.

Mike Harman

Video clip on immigration, it may be that the clip is out of context and he has arguments on how border controls contribute to lower wages for immigrants via making them easier to exploit/keeping people undocumented, and how organising all workers impacts on competition, but that bit by itself is not good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW210UyV9g8 I can't sit through long youtube clips so if someone has something in text format that'd be better.

Here's a Wolff article on immigration
https://www.rdwolff.com/how_capitalism_perpetuates_immigration

Richard Wolff

Modern times offer more examples. The US repeatedly undermined basic living conditions in its de facto colony, Puerto Rico, driving millions to move to the US mainland. There, they repeatedly encountered all manner of discriminations, abuse and scapegoating. The US economic dominance of Mexico and Central America as informal colonies -- intensified by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) -- produced the same result, but on a much larger scale. US capitalists used Latin American immigrants as means to exert downward pressures on wages and working conditions, with the usual anti-immigrant results. Following the European colonial pattern, some in the corporate and governing US elite congratulate themselves for denouncing scapegoating, intolerance, etc. and castigating those with such attitudes as "deplorables."

I remember Dean Baker, American liberal involved in Center for Economic and Policy Research, also making similar arguments in his Conservative Nanny State book. One of the arguments there was that the US restricts the immigration of professional workers that would "create downward pressure" on white-collar jobs but allows that to happen for blue-collar jobs. The point he argues is this would make such professional-job services cheaper for consumers. Of course it's all bourgeois nonsense. Here's some of that though:

Dean Baker

Trade is not the only mechanism that nanny state conservatives have used to depress the wages of the bulk of the population. Immigration has also been an important tool to depress the wages of a substantial segment of the workforce. The principle with immigration is exactly the same as with trade. It takes advantage of the billions of workers in developing coutnries who are willing to work at substantially lower wages than workers in the United States to drive down the wages in a wide range of occupations. [...] The difference is that the nanny state conservatives get to bring in immigrants at low wages to meet their needs whereas the doctors and lawyers can count on the nanny state to protect them from competitition with immigrant workers. [...] But trade does not have to depress the wages of less-skilled workers. Trade agreements can also be structured to get us low cost doctors, lawyers, accountants, economists, reporters, and editorial writers.

ajjohnstone

On my travels around American progressive websites I have found he is quite popular. He makes regular videos of his talks. He talks the talk that resonates with many American leftists.

A while back, I wrote a short item for our blog on him

https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2011/05/sheep-in-wolffs-clothing.html

That's a nice piece (might want to correct his name from Robert to Richard though). Might still be worth doing a more up-to-date response to him with all that he's done since 2011 and with the popularity and following he's recently got, maybe one that focuses more on his mis-understanding of Marx in light of his book/essay. He seems to think workers controlling their own surplus value, needed to reproduce themselves as worker-capitalists, means the end of capitalism and is what Marx envisaged, which doesn't really appreciate Capital being a critique of, among other things, surplus value and all the other features of the capitalist mode of production; it wasn't a call for workers to become "capital personified", etc. He doesn't seem to have any conception of a Socialism/Communism (as we see from the "Communist Organization/Business" I mentioned above and which he claims has some basis in Marx) where production is carried out to satisfy people's needs or where money and exchange cease to exist.

Here's also Luxemburg, who Wolff cites as an influence, writing against producer coops (really just repeating standard anti-capitalist arguments against workers starting their own enterprises) in Reform or Revolution against Eduard Bernstein and co.:

Luxemburg

But in capitalist economy exchange dominates production. As a result of competition, the complete domination of the process of production by the interests of capital – that is, pitiless exploitation – becomes a condition for the survival of each enterprise. The domination of capital over the process of production expresses itself in the following ways. Labour is intensified. The work day is lengthened or shortened, according to the situation of the market. And, depending on the requirements of the market, labour is either employed or thrown back into the street. In other words, use is made of all methods that enable an enterprise to stand up against its competitors in the market. The workers forming a co-operative in the field of production are thus faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism. They are obliged to take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur – a contradiction that accounts for the usual failure of production co-operatives which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers’ interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving.

Bernstein has himself taken note of these facts. But it is evident that he has not understood them. For, together with Mrs. Potter-Webb, he explains the failure of production co-operatives in England by their lack of “discipline.” But what is so superficially and flatly called here “discipline” is nothing else than the natural absolutist regime of capitalism, which it is plain, the workers cannot successfully use against themselves.